“But if they were kickin’ it at certain eating establishments earlier, someone might remember them. Because, who do you talk to at the casinos? There are a dozen of them, with all kinds of staff, and they’re all on privacy patrol,” Wish said.
Nina nodded. This made sense. “They had to eat somewhere, and it might have been close.”
“So first we find the witnesses, and from those individuals we get the shooter’s description so we can find him.”
“Child’s play,” Sandy said, “for an individual of your vast potential.”
“That is correct,” Wish said. “I hope.” He swiveled to eyeball his mother. “Are you teasing?”
“Far be it.”
“Because if you are, now’s not a good time. A woman died. I intend to help Nina find out how it happened.”
Appearing chastened for the first time Nina had ever witnessed, Sandy nodded. “I know you will, Willis.” As quietly as the breeze floating through the pines outside the window, she added, “I hope you realize your dad and I are proud of you.”
Wish sat up straight and firmed his jaw. He and Sandy looked away from each other.
“The court hearing on the motion to dismiss the lawsuit is set for Tuesday,” Nina announced.
“Say no more,” Wish said, getting up.
“How’s the old brown van working these days?” It had been Paul’s before he passed it on to Wish and bought himself a Mustang. It had been Paul’s when she met him, and danced with him, and fell in love with him.
“Perfectly, as long as you fill the tank every five minutes.”
“Well, good luck, Wish.”
“Thanks, boss,” Wish said, donning his sunglasses. “I’ll check in on Monday.”
Nina and Sandy worked through the morning. Finally, Nina said, “Enough. I have to pick up Bob.”
Sandy squared up her file pile, asking, “What’s he doing this fall? Besides high school?”
“Well, he started a business. He wants to make some money.”
“What’s he doing, yard work?”
“No,” Nina said. “He collects hazardous waste all around Tahoe Paradise and takes it to the dump. He has a partner, Taylor Nordholm, his friend at school.”
“Hazardous waste?”
“Paint, mostly.”
“And how does he get it to the dump? He’s only fourteen, right?”
“ Taylor ’s father takes them in his pickup. But I think the neighbors are driving hard bargains. They ask the boys to take washing machines, car parts, all kinds of stuff that’s hard to dispose of. And they want to pay later.”
“I’ll have a talk with Bob next time he comes in the office about getting paid and what’s legal.”
“Great. Uh, speaking of pay, I can’t give you that raise for a couple more months. When some of the receivables come in.”
“I should know. I cook the books.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” Sandy said. She shut down the Macintosh and pushed her chair back, her earrings faintly tinkling. “Of course, you could give me a raise effective today and make a back payment when the checks come in.”
“Good suggestion. I’ll think about it. Well, got to get going,” Nina said.
“Me, too.”
“What are you up to on this beautiful Saturday afternoon?” Nina asked as she packed up her briefcase.
“Job interview,” Sandy said. She checked her watch, her face serene.
“What?”
“Michael Stamp’s office. His secretary quit to have twins. Very inconsiderate of her, he said. I hear the pay is good.”
Nina snapped the briefcase shut. “Very funny. Stop kidding around, Sandy. You gave me a bad shock for a minute there.”
“I never kid,” Sandy said. She wiped a speck of dust off the telephone with her finger. Nina stared at the competent brown hand, the varnished fingernails, the silver ring with its three turquoises. Sandy bent down and blew on the phone receiver, inspected it critically, seemed satisfied. She picked up her tote.
Nina said, “Hang on. I’ll walk out with you.” She locked the door and they walked at Sandy ’s dignified pace down the hall to the exterior door of the Starlake Building, Nina deep in thought. The hell of it was, Sandy didn’t kid, not much anyway.
“See you Monday,” Sandy said.
“So what I’m thinking is, when some of the big checks come in, you’ll get your raise retroactive to today,” Nina said.
Sandy shaded her eyes and looked east toward the mountains.
“Okay?”
“I was just thinking I better get home right away. Clouds risin’ up from the coast. Might storm. Joe’s getting lazy. He needs to make sure the animals make it into the barn.”
Late in the afternoon, just as Nina, Bob, and their dog, Hitchcock, reached the far side of Spooner Lake, the clouds did boil up and blow, offering them the choice to run for twenty minutes through the downpour or seek shelter. They decided to run for it, Bob recklessly crashing along the trail with its clutter of roots and pine cones, Hitchcock at his heels, running with his nose to the ground, Nina picking her way behind, the brim of her baseball cap pulled low. They jumped into the Bronco, laughing wildly, Hitchcock making a mess in the back seat.
Nina turned the key in the ignition, and stopped laughing. “Our truck appears to be dead,” she said. Rain pounded on the roof, and she shivered and reached back for her emergency sweatshirt.
Bob scratched his head and leaned over. “It’s in gear. It won’t start in second gear, y’know, Mom.”
“Of course I know. Did you put it in second for some reason?” She moved into park, started up, shifted to drive, and turned on the wipers. Bob found some paper towels in the glove compartment and dried his face. Hitchcock poked his furry head between them and Bob carefully wiped the dog’s face too, saying, “That’s it, blame me.”
“Well, I didn’t do it.”
“You did it by accident. You’re getting absentminded.”
At fourteen, he thought the worst of her. “Not so. Why would I do such a thing?” She pulled onto the wet road.
“Why would I?”
She had no answer for that.
“Hey, do a rooster tail in the flooded part of the road there.”
“I don’t think so.” But the water was so tempting. Pushing hard on the accelerator, getting up to forty, she angled through a foot of water and enjoyed spritzing the fir trees along the road.
Bob laughed heartily. Then he said, “Uh-oh. A guy was standing in the trees right there. I think we got him.” Nina slowed.
“Too late now,” Bob said. “Anyways, he was already wet.”
“We’d better go back and apologize,” Nina said, “or he’ll go home and kick his cat. Bad karma will vibrate through the universe.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Bob said. “He looked funny.”
“Funny?”
“I think he was wearing a ski mask. Like in a slasher movie. It was hard to see.”
“It’s raining.”
“That’s really going to keep the rain off, a knit ski mask.” Nina thought, But you wouldn’t call 911 because of it. The shooter in the Hanna case had worn a ski mask.
Don’t think, she told herself. It’s just a guy in the road.
But what was a man doing in the road in that downpour, in a ski mask?
“I say keep going. If you want to get punished, I can always spray you with the hose when we get home,” Bob said.
Looking in her rearview mirror, Nina could see no sign of anyone. The rain came down like the sky really was falling, one of those autumn cloudbursts that come from nowhere and leave just as abruptly. The wipers had a hard time maintaining visibility.
They had lost him. “Okay, let’s go.”
When they reached the highway that circles Lake Tahoe, the rain stopped. It was almost six o’clock and wouldn’t be dark for some time yet. “What shall we have for supper?”
“Pancakes.”
“That’s so inappropriate for dinner.”
“You could have a burger. You don’t have to eat pancakes. We’re almost at Zephyr Cove. Are you pulling in or not?”
“Okay, okay.”
The pancake house, an old wooden structure in the trees not far from the yellow beach, housed a motley collection of drenched tourists. Their table, just under a tall window, offered a good westward view as another cloudburst flitted across the lake. They sipped ice water, watching as sheets of rain fell here and there in the distance and evening slipped across the world. The mountains ringing the lake were only a shade or two of darker blue against sky above and water below.
“Uh-oh. Red alert. Look who’s here,” Bob said, pointing toward the window with his menu.
“Who?”
“I think maybe it’s that guy in the woods you soaked.”
“Where?” She felt a clutching in her chest.
Oh, yes. There was a figure a long way away, in the parking lot, near a beat-up white SUV…
“Hey, that’s our Bronco!” Nina cried, sliding off the wooden bench.
“Wait for me!” Bob took the lead as they ran out the front door. Now, even across the lot, they could hear Hitchcock. Part malamute, mostly mutt, he seldom barked, but he was barking now, loudly and continuously. The man had disappeared.
They walked around the Bronco, trying the doors-locked, as they had left them.
“Mom!” Bob yelled. Nina ran around and saw Bob crouched on the ground by the right rear tire, holding something. He held it out and Nina saw that it was an air-valve cap. Bob jumped up and walked cautiously around the truck with her. The air plugs had been opened on all four of their plump, balding snow tires.
Bob twisted the caps back on. The tires looked soft but drivable. Hitchcock leaped against the window.
“Well, at least he didn’t get in the car and steal our crummy radio,” Nina said. There was plenty of open asphalt around them. He seemed to be gone.
“Hitchcock would’ve had to kill him.”
Nina didn’t want to disturb Bob any further. She said, “Let’s get poor Hitchcock out and calm him down, then go back inside and eat. This guy’s not coming back. Man, some people don’t know how to take a little accident with good grace. Can you believe he would follow us just to pull a nasty trick like this…” She took out her keys and began to stick one into the driver’s-side lock, but Bob’s hand swooped out to stop her.
“Mom, wait a second. I have a bad feeling.”
The paranoid professional self kicked in immediately. She clipped her keys to her bag and stepped back. “What’s the matter, Bob?”
“Maybe those caps-you never know. Maybe he wanted to distract us.” Bob apparently found that an adequate explanation.
“From what, exactly?”
But he had finished explaining. “Just wait, okay? Step away a long way from the vehicle.” He said it playfully, but she sensed he was trying to protect her in his own way.
She stepped back, frowning, nervous and unhappy. Black clouds like the ones overhead clumped in her mind.
Methodically, moving with the practiced ease of an experienced Gulf Warrior, or at least like a kid who had played quite a few video combat games in his day, Bob slunk around the car, examining each inch of the exterior, then shimmied underneath.
“What are you doing? Don’t do that.” Nina kept the panic out of her voice with an effort.
“Looking.”
She swallowed, watching Hitchcock hurl himself against the window. “Anything?” she asked when she could stand the suspense no longer.
“Well,” Bob said, “yeah.” He wriggled out from under the car, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her farther away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Come on! I hate to tell you, but it’s bad.”
“A tracker?” she asked. “GPS or something?”
“Worse!”
“What do you mean?”
“Mom, I think it’s an explosive. Call the cops, Mom. You stay right here. I’ll get Hitchcock out…”
“No! No! Stay away from it!” This time Nina did the pulling, and it took some lengthy argument and anguished begging to stop Bob from risking his life to save his pet.
Once she felt she could trust Bob to stay away from the Bronco, she called the police, all the time watching Hitchcock’s liquid eyes, frightened for him and his big wet tongue. Oblivious, just wanting to get with the people he loved, he continued to assault the windows. Nina and Bob walked out of his line of sight so that he would stop.
Within minutes several police cars arrived. Six officers carefully evacuated the restaurant, filing people out one by one, keeping them as far away as possible from the parking lot. People from the restaurant, unable to leave without cars, were joined by a crowd of neighborhood people. Everybody stood bug-eyed behind yellow caution tape, rubbernecking, but still unable to see much.
“Our dog,” Nina said to a policewoman. “Our dog!”
“We’ll try to save him, ma’am.”
Was that supposed to make her feel better, she wondered, succumbing to an anxious gush of tears. Bob, glitter-eyed but too old to cry, patted her on the back.
A bomb squad showed up in a white van. For another hour, they scurried back and forth between the parking lot and van. “What’s going on?” she asked everyone she saw who looked official. “What about our dog?” She imagined him inside, confused by the strangers invading their territory, banging against the window, and although she tried to stop such thoughts, she imagined him dead, in pieces flung all over the parking lot.
In every scenario she had ever seen on TV, the car blew up. In this scenario, the police prodded spectators to move back, back, back. Everyone moved. They all heard the bass boom as the bomb detonated hundreds of yards away on a beach by Lake Tahoe, well away from the parking lot.
They were informed that their vehicle was now “good to go.”
Bob walked up to their car and stuck his hand through an open window so that he could touch Hitchcock. “I guess we won’t be doing any more rooster tails, Mom.”
Back in the restaurant the newly returned, excited patrons plied her with questions, but Nina didn’t know what to say, so she beelined back to their table and tracked down their server. “You saw what happened. Was anyone around here-watching us or anything?”
“There was a guy. He checked out your table after you left. I thought he might be hoping you ran out without your purse or something.” The girl, no more than seventeen, held a steaming platter with at least four plates full of food in one hand.
“What did he look like?”
“About forty. Denim jacket, work boots. Dripping.”
“Was he wearing a ski mask?”
“A floppy hat. Uncool people wear them to golf in, you know? I chased him off.” She eyed the plates she was holding. The food was getting cold.
“Thanks,” Nina said. She pulled a bill out of her wallet and put it in the girl’s free hand.
“Oh, one other thing,” the girl said, tucking the money into a pocket. “He walked funny.”
“How funny? How did he walk?”
“Crooked, like the old guy on the old The Real McCoys show. Remember? Well, that was pretty exaggerated, the way he walked. This guy was bowlegged. Or maybe he just has a bad foot?”
Out in the lot the wind whipped through the trees. She spent some time with the cops. She told them about the ski mask in the Hanna case, and the floppy hat, and the bad leg. The officer did not seem impressed. “Ski mask on the road, no information as to his walk. Then floppy hat, bad leg. Different individual, probably,” he said. “Too bad you didn’t see the guy in the road take a few steps.”
“Look. This was an attempted murder.”
“More likely, ma’am, an attempt to frighten you. There wasn’t enough explosive to kill you inside the passenger compartment. On the other hand, any explosive at all is terrifically dangerous around a gas tank. You were lucky.”
“Please give your reports to Sergeant Cheney. It may be a link to the Hanna case.”
“I will.”
“Who else would try to blow us up? I don’t have any enemies like that.”
“How would this man even know you were in the case? And if he knew, why would he want to kill you?”
“Because-I don’t know why.”
“I’ll talk to Cheney.” They talked about her security system.
Bob waited for her in the truck, petting Hitchcock.
“Did you walk him?” she asked through the window.
“Yeah. He took a good long whiz. Must’ve smelled the explosive. He was heading for the beach.”
“Tell me you didn’t go there!”
“I stayed by the truck. The beach was roped off. They’re still cleaning up.”
She slammed the door and got in. “Whew! It’s evil out there!” She unclipped her keys and they dropped onto the floor.
While she felt around for them, Bob said, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Mom. This car’s safer today than most days.”
Finding them, she reached toward the back seat to give Hitchcock the opportunity to lick her wrist and hand.
“You were right about the bad karma,” Bob said. “He followed us here. It’s like, if you accidentally spill your soda on some kid, of course he turns out to be the meanest psycho kid in school, and waits for you after school, gets you back much worse. Know what I mean?”
“What did the police say to you?”
“‘What’s he look like?’ I told them.”
“Bob, do you remember? Was the man in the parking lot wearing a ski mask? Or a floppy hat?”
Bob shrugged. “He was a ways away.”
“Maybe. Bob-” Bob had his arms around Hitchcock’s damp, furry neck, his eyes closed, his cheek pressed against the dog’s ear. Hair pressed flat to his head, ears standing out, Bob looked a bit like a dog himself as he communed with Hitchcock. Nina caught herself thinking, If anything ever happens to that dog-and she knew she was really thinking about Bob. A sharp pain lanced through her right eye.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“How sure are you that the man by the Bronco was the same as the man in the ski mask on the road?”
Case of Lies Page 6